VIDEO GAMES QUOTES II

quotations about video games

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As long as games are part of a thinking person's culturally balanced diet, I don't worry too much.

TOM BISSELL

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54% of gamers surveyed said video games provided better value for money than movies, music, and DVDs.

JAMIE MCKANE

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As animation develops and video games approach films in the quality of their images, it seems likely that video games will evolve into a new kind of adventure film in which game players become the lead actors and actresses.

ARTHUR ASA BERGER

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Gamers have had enough of reality. They are abandoning it in droves--a few hours here, an entire weekend there, sometimes every spare minute of every day for stretches at a time--in favor of simulated environments and online games.

JANE MCGONIGAL

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Video games are no substitute for real world pleasures (marriage, the birth of a child, spiritual enlightenment, what have you), but they do provide a nice reprieve from real world woes.

BRETT WEISS

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Video games are nonlinear. In almost all cases, you don't simply start at the beginning and proceed along a predefined path to a conclusion. Like chess or Monopoly, different players have different experiences.

LAWRENCE KUTNER & CHERYL OLSON

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In a way, trying to impress people with design or personality or whatever works to promote movies doesn't work with games because it takes the focus off the player who is supposed to be the star. The more the player is the star, the better a game you have.

SID MEIER

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A book or movie can show us what it is like to be in a character's shoes, but it is the video game that can put us into those shoes.

ROBERT B. MARKS

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Ever since gun violence became "normal" in our society, video games have been pointed to as a reason to explain real-world murders. I'm not here to say what causes people to shoot each other down in the streets, but I know one thing: Video games are not the problem.

JAKE MAGEE

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Video games are better without stories. Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative?

IAN BOGOST

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Psychos will always be psychos; they don't need video games to help them.

SCOTT RAMSOOMAIR

Tags: Scott Ramsoomair

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Many games, such as Minecraft, are better described as electronic places to visit than traditional video games, but in the process of interacting with them, we create experiences, which in turn become our narratives and stories.

ROBERT B. MARKS

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Communication is one of the biggest challenges of video game design. How much information do players need before they go where you want them to go? Looking back, the games we think of as "retro" were often vague in telegraphing what players should do. In the modern era, the pendulum has swung the other way, and now many developers seem to err on the side of caution, guiding players through even large, open-ended experiences. But it doesn't have to be that way. While it is important to make sure gamers can find out what to do and where to go at any given moment, those mechanics increasingly come at the expense of discovery, diluting some of the greatest joys to be found in exploring virtual worlds.

JON MARTINDALE

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Video games are part of a trend in cultural history that started 20,000 years ago, as the number and types of symbolic codes external to the individual mind went from none to few to many. In a world in which devices for external memory storage have become increasingly important, video games socialize the minds of players to deal with the symbolic systems of the computer, society's latest form of external memory storage.

BARRIE GUNTER

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There is some question about the degree to which a player really has important choices in games. Video games are designed so that there are elements of choice in them but that is not the same thing as free choice or absolute choice, in which characters can do anything they want to do. There is a set of choices that are open to players at every moment, but these choices, and all choices in video games, are predetermined by the game designers. It is the parser and the design of the video game that determines what we are capable of doing when we play these games! This is an important matter to keep in mind because it qualifies the notion that video games are interactive or limits our notion of what interactivity is all about.

ARTHUR ASA BERGER

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In retrospect, it's easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run. An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

IAN BOGOST

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Basically, video games are a fun way to pass the time and feel good about yourself when you have too much free time forced into your life.

PATRICK ALLAN

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Video games keep getting more complex and visually appealing, so it's no wonder more people are drawn to them nowadays. But this new era of compelling digital entertainment could have a dark side for unemployed young men. It might sound like something an old man shouts from his rocking chair, but kids these days appear to be more interested in escapism than diving into the job market. A preliminary report from economists at Princeton, the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago, suggests a strong link between electronic leisure activities and unemployment rates for men in their 20s.

PATRICK ALLAN

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I used to think that games were a great storytelling medium, potentially, and that idiot writers were fucking it up. I don't believe that any more. I now believe that whatever the purpose of this medium is, it's not quite to tell stories. What were the first games? Space Invaders, Pac-Man. These were goal-oriented activities that had a vague overlay of story. So now we fast-forward thirty years, and games are primarily story-like experiences organized around the successful achievement of goals. And so the balance has flipped. The storytelling game and the purer, more traditional type of video game are, I think, on a path of divergence right now: whatever is happening in video games is going to split these two kinds of games off from each other, and so storytelling games are, eventually, going to become their own thing.

TOM BISSELL

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Video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport.

ROB PARDO

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